


Weak

by Zoadgo



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Near Death Experiences, post 3x15, potentially canon divergent, wound care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-08 07:21:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6844684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roan is left to die in a dirt cell after being shot by Kane, but Clarke decides there's been enough death that day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weak

Roan had to survive. That’s what was running through his mind when he teamed up with the Skaikru girl, when he held a knife to her throat and tried to threaten his way out of a situation gone bad, and when he tried to run. He needed to survive, for his people, in order to guide them through this current threat and lead them to prosperity. When he saw the man standing there with the gun, when the bullet hit his chest and he was dragged away, that fixed thought wavered. For the first time, Roan thought he might fail.

The pain radiating from the bullet was so all-consuming that Roan was certain he was dying. He couldn’t move, couldn’t fight off the men who threw him in a dark room and locked him up like a crazed animal. He laid there on the cold dirt, wound pressing into the floor and hurting more than any stab wound he’d ever received, and waited for his life to soak into the floor, for once not focused on living for his people. Not focused on anything, he waited to die.

He couldn’t be certain of the passage of time, didn’t know if being on the verge of death would change how the seconds ticked by. Roan counted them anyway, regardless of if he was being accurate or not. There was no reason to it, but there was nothing else to do in the cell until he slipped away. His seconds slipped into minutes, but he kept counting hundreds more until his mind began to wander. 

He wondered if he might not be dying as rapidly as he had previously thought. Maybe there was a chance to get out of here. A chance for him to stand up, dust himself off, and live. He could return to his people and they could move to the glaciers. Even the army of mindless drones in Polis would have a hard time finding them there; the cold was a harsh punishment even for those raised in it, and the crevasses would be happy to hide his people and kill those unfamiliar with the land.

All he had to do was move. Just shift his uninjured arm, use it to push himself up, bandage his wound, and find a way out of this cell. It was simple in his mind, so simple, like the seconds that he was no longer keeping track of. Yet his arm refused to move more than a few inches, even that an impossible labour, and any weight being put on his wound seemed to cause something within it to shift and place him in him even greater agony. He strained for a while, struggling to gain the strength to move properly, before collapsing again without hardly changing his position at all.

It was useless. He’d lost too much blood in the time he’d given up on life, and now he was actually going to die because for one moment he forgot that he needed to do everything to keep living. King Roan of Azgeda was going to end his reign shortly after starting it because of that damn Skaikru girl and her plans. If he’d had the strength to laugh, he would have, at the thought of how her plans seemed to always get those around her killed. Maybe they should have had her scheme with this Alie woman and this whole thing could have been avoided.

Roan’s consciousness faded and drifted, alertness such as it was only returning to him when the rumbling of explosions shook his cell. He wondered if Clarke might have magicked herself out of her predicament again. Surely the brainwashed soldiers weren’t blowing up their own city, so it was only logical. Although logic never seemed to apply to Clarke. Things that should have destroyed her always seemed to fall short. When a second explosion woke his mind up a touch, Roan was willing to acknowledge that he almost admired the girl. Nothing ever stopped her, and he hoped for his and his people’s sake that would hold true now as well. 

She might have caused his death indirectly with her failed plan, but now she was the only hope for his people. He’d seen the soldiers, seen their synchronicity, and he knew that the glaciers were the only way to fight them off. But his people wouldn’t see that. Without their King’s command, they would be stubborn. They would fight, and they would lose far too many. He thought they could win, but the cost would be high. 

His consciousness had slipped from him again, with a prayer for the Skaikru rebels and his people half formed in his mind. Roan had thought that was the end, that this lapse into blackness would be the last. He would die, because of his proximity to Wanheda, and she would topple another kingdom. He hoped she wouldn’t turn her attention towards Azgeda after, but he was as powerless to stop that as he was to fight off the grey fog taking over his mind.

“...oan? Roan, come on, please. Shit.”

The words are hardly a whisper to him, not enough to draw him back even though the voice speaking them is painfully familiar. Roan doesn’t care to pursue figuring out who the voice belongs to, no, he’s too far gone for that. He vaguely feels that he’s being moved, but it’s still not enough. And then something does jolt him back to awareness, back to life with a painfully large breath and pain ripping through him from the wound in his chest. His eyes refuse to properly focus on anything, simply taking in a general concept of darkness and a flash of gold before fixing on the source of his pain. There, they see red.

Red blood, his blood, staining pale skin that is not his own. Clinging to a hand, and attached to that hand is fingers which are currently buried inside of him, and god that hurts worse than being shot did. A strangled noise crawls from his throat, and he would fight off his abuser and flee, but he can’t find a single fiber of his being that seems to be able to do anything other than sing pain and shock.

“Just stay there, I’ve almost got it,” says the voice that had whispered to him. The familiar voice, and Roan’s gaze breaks sharply from the pain to the source of the words.

A brow furrowed in concentration, blood and dirt rubbed into skin, and bright hair. He knows that face, that stubborn jaw and the blue eyes locked on his chest. The name refuses to come to him from his mind, and then the pain abates abruptly as the woman grins in savage triumph and raises her blood soaked hand in front of her. She looks at a lump of metal in her grip, and then sits back. It’s only at that moment that Roan realizes she was kneeling partially on his chest, and he sucks in an easier breath.

“Clarke.” His voice is a shaky whisper, but the name is the right one. Without her digging around in his chest, Roan can think much clearer. She looks down on him with a weary smile for a moment before placing the bullet on the ground and turning to search for something in a bag next to her.

“Back among the living? Thank god.” Honest relief is evident in her voice, and she turns back to him with bandages and a metal cannister in her hands.

Clarke pours some of the liquid from the container onto his chest, Roan just now realizing that she must have taken his jacket and shirt off before digging into him, and Roan grunts at the burn from it. Unapologetic, she places a clean pad of cloth over the wound and then aids him into as close to a sitting as he can manage with the world spinning around him so dangerously. He ends up more slumped forward as Clarke wraps long strips around his chest, pressing the bandaging pad firmly against the injury. Roan accepts her ministrations in silence, too light headed from sitting upright to do much more than cling to consciousness with tooth and nail.

When she lays him back down and begins cleaning the blood from her hands, Roan’s brain has enough blood in it to realize that this is wrong. He was going to leave her behind when he ran, she shouldn’t be treating his wounds. She shouldn’t even have found him in the first place, and if she ended up at his cell by accident, it would have been easy to move on and let him die.

“Why?” The word slips out of his mouth rather than being a thought, and Clarke looks at him in confusion, pausing her cleaning for a moment. Roan clears his throat slightly and continues, “Why are you saving me? You should have let me die.”

For a moment, she’s the fierce Wanheda who stabbed him in the stomach and tried to kill his mother. There’s a hardness in her gaze for just one of those seconds Roan had been counting earlier, and then it’s gone. She clenches her still bloody hands into fists on her knees and stares down at them, the rest of her body sagging slightly. Clarke shakes her head slowly.

“Not today. I’m not letting anyone else die today.” It could be a fierce statement, a challenge to the universe, but it comes out more as an exhausted bargain. A plea to herself to do something different.

“You won,” Roan states. He’s not sure if it’s meant to be comfort, or if it’s a question that came out wrong.

“Did we?” Clarke looks at him, no longer with the fire of Wanheda in her eyes, but still strong despite the tears he can see there, “I killed Alie, but is that winning? With the price we paid?”

Roan doesn’t know the price she paid, doesn’t know what happened or even really who Alie is. But he does know war, and that’s what Clarke was fighting. He knows fighting, he knows killing, and he knows sacrifice. He had learned how to pay the price for victory from a young age, and for all her strength, Roan can see that that is Clarke’s weakness. She knows how to kill, is willing to die for her people, but doesn’t know how to accept them dying for her.

Roan feels a little more alive than he had with Clarke’s fingers in his chest, and he uses some of his painfully slowly replenishing health to raise his arm. He touches Clarke’s chin lightly with his thumb, fingers curled slightly to hold her looking at him. He tries to convey the truth of what he’s saying with that, tries to impart to her what he had learned and she doesn’t yet know. 

“You won.”

Clarke closes her eyes and starts to shake her head, and Roan grips tighter with his hand. Still a feeble grasp, but enough to stop her protest. When she opens her eyes again, there’s more tears there, and Roan can see how young she is. Not her years, lord knows Azgeda doesn’t care about that, but the youth in her spirit. She doesn’t know sacrifice, hasn’t seen the true weight of it until recently. Roan can hardly remember when he was so young, but he knows he once was.

“Clarke Griffin, Wandheda of the Skaikru,” Roan recites her titles and feels Clarke’s shudder, “You won a war today. Did you kill anyone outside of the direct pursuit of victory?”

“No,” the reply is quiet, but it’s enough for Roan.

“Did you take pleasure in the death caused, beyond that attached to the victory?”

The fire flares in Clarke’s eyes again, and her response is hard. “No.”

“Did you do what was best for your people?”

“I…” Clarke trails off and drops her eyes from Roan’s, and there’s that youth again. Roan squeezes her chin gently to regain her attention, and guilt permeates Clarke’s words as she replies, “I don’t know.”

“Not good enough.” Roan’s words are harsh, and there’s that flash of strength in her gaze again. He refuses to back down from it or apologize, instead continuing on, “You’re their leader. It doesn’t matter if you could have saved more, in hindsight. In the moment, given the information you had on the battlefield, did you do the best for your people?”

“It’s not that simple,” Clarke’s voice is hard, and Roan raises an eyebrow slightly.

“It is.”

“It’s-” Clarke begins another protest, before stopping herself and looking at the ground for a moment. When she looks at Roan, there’s still guilt lurking in her, but she answers him, “Yes, at the time I did what was best for my people.”

“So you didn’t cause death that wasn’t necessary, you didn’t kill for fun, you did what was best for your people given what you knew at the time, and you saved the life of someone who has only ever been your situational ally at best, and attempted to run while leaving you behind to die.” 

“But it wasn’t enough,” Clarke states, and Roan pulls her face closer to his, narrowing his eyes.

“You. Won. Don’t disrespect those who died for you by pretending you didn’t,” With that, Roan releases her chin, dropping his extremely tired arm back to the ground.

Clarke opens her mouth to say something before closing it and leaning back. She frowns slightly before resuming washing the blood off of her hands, and she seems to be devoting more attention to the task than it actually requires. Roan hopes she’s finding the truth in her words. It’s not her fault that no one ever taught her the reality of the world, that she was allowed to be a child for so long. But because she was so protected, she’s now unable to deal with the world she’s a leader in, and that’s not right. 

As Clarke scrubs at her hands, Roan shifts slightly, testing out his strength and what’s going to cause him the most pain. He no longer feels like there’s something inside of him sending out lances of agony in his chest when he presses experimentally on the wound, so that’s an improvement. And he manages to push himself up slightly with only a small amount of dizziness. The pain makes him grimace when he does so, but it’s worth it to no longer be laying on the dirt. He looks around for his shirt, and sees it woefully out of his reach.

“I never thought of it that way,” Clarke says without looking up from her mostly clean hands, “As disrespecting them.”

Roan sighs and settles his weight leaning on his good elbow, “You’ve never had to before.”

Clarke shakes her head and sets the bloodied cloth she’d been using aside, checking her hands once over for blood before leaning over and grabbing Roan’s shirt.

“You’ll learn to,” he states as Clarke helps him into the shirt with minimal jostling of the wound.

“And if I don’t want to have to learn that?” Clarke asks as she retrieves Roan’s jacket and drapes it over his shoulders.

“The world isn’t going to change for your wants, Wanheda.”

Clarke freezes for a moment at the title. “Don’t call me that.”

“It’s who you are. You’re Clarke, but you’re also Wanheda. The sooner you learn to live up to the name, the stronger you’ll be.”

“And what if those two can’t exist together? Clarke and Wanheda?” Clarke looks at her hands again, and Roan wonders if she’s remembering his blood there, or someone else’s.

Roan huffs a small laugh at her words, and she looks up at him, clearly offended at the fact that he would laugh at her dilemma.

“You saved me, remember that? Do you also remember that time you stabbed me?” Roan lifts his shirt a little to reveal the scar, “I’d say you’re doing just fine at being both. You don’t have to be Clarke and Wanheda at the same time. Not every situation calls for the Commander of Death, but when it does, you need to be able to face that.”

Clarke’s eyes stayed locked on Roan’s scar and she reaches out to it, tracing it so lightly he can hardly notice it. He lets her, lets her come to the realization that she’s capable of harming and of saving. Hell, she’s even capable of doing both to the same person. She needs to reconcile the two parts of herself and realize that they’re not exclusive, and Roan is willing to be the instrument for that. If she can manage it, if she can manifest her true strength, he would like to have her as an ally for the Azgeda.

“You have faith in me.” Clarke's brow is furrowed in confusion as she speaks, and Roan shrugs.

“With everything I’ve seen, I’d be stupid not to. You have the potential to be a respected and fearsome leader, and for all that I may have doubted you in the past, you have a way of turning things in your favour.” Roan means every word of it, to his own mild surprise. He’d never even thought of Clarke’s future that much, but he knows the truth of it as he speaks. He respects her, even with the weakness he’d seen today and her clear conflict with herself. He believes in Wanheda, and more than that, he believes in Clarke.

“My own people don’t believe in me.”

“Convince them. You think every warrior of Azgeda was thrilled when I took the throne? No, you’ve got to make people know that they can trust in you.”

“How?”

“That one I can’t answer, Wanheda. But you will figure it out.”

Clarke frowns slightly at that, but just for a moment, and she doesn’t recoil from the name. She looks up at Roan and nods slightly, looking stronger in that moment even after all of her self doubt than Roan had ever seen her. This wasn’t an unyielding shell of hardness, this was a sign of true inner strength. Of maturity, the type Azgeda values. 

Clarke seems to debate something for a moment, and then she leans in quickly. She presses her lips to Roan’s, soft and firm for a heartbeat less than it takes him to respond. He licks his lips as she pulls away, tasting sweat the grit of battle, looking at her with an unspoken question.

“Thank you,” Clarke says in response to his silent query, “For having faith in me.”

“Anytime, Clarke.” He holds her gaze until she pushes herself to her feet, dusting off dirt in a futile attempt of cleanliness given the blood soaked into her clothes. 

“Do you think you can walk?” Clarke holds a hand out to him, and Roan takes it without hesitation.

“I’ll manage.”

In the end, he ends up leaning on Clarke more than actually supporting his own weight. But they make it out of his cage, and out of the graveyard that is Polis. When Clarke leaves him with the ragtag medical crew of her people remaining, he watches her walk away, lit by the fire of the Tower burning. Her head is held high, and he sees none of her earlier doubt there. She’ll be just fine, and no matter if she matures into Clarke Griffin, Wanheda, or a balance of the two, Roan knows she will be valuable ally for his people and for him. He smiles to himself as he leans on an improvised cot and drinks some liquid the medics hand him. He can’t wait to see what happens next.

**Author's Note:**

> I need Roan to be alive, guys. I need it. 
> 
> In other news, sorry I haven't updated my multichap in a while, but don't worry, I'm still sticking with it! I just have been super lazy about writing lately. 
> 
> Y'all should thank [Etra](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) for saving you from my excessive word repetition, she's the best ever. If you guys want to come cry with me [on tumblr](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com), I'm more than happy to sob with you. 
> 
> Thanks in advance for commenting, reading, and leaving kudos <3


End file.
